Watching the Smoke

20 Rough Theses to Make (Non)-Sense of Surrealism in the 21st Century Afro-American Life

Note: This was supposed to be an essay but it’s too unclear like the smoke.

1. African-American art exists in an uncertain period. The post-racial Civil rights era is gone and now we are bombarded by AI images of Malcolm X shaking hands with Charlie Kirk in Heaven. Some “Black” narratives are fixated on the past while others with the future. Both of these perspectives are troubling. The Black historical drama and it’s derivatives relies too much upon nostalgia or historical determinism while Afro-futurism has struggled to cohere a real critique and seems to be mostly focused upon empty aesthetics. The Afro-future is just another simulacrum.

2. The novel remains one of the primary forces to me when it comes to interpreting the surreal. We’re not really creating anything. We’re just being spoken to by the universe and putting a few words down. What is fiction? The line between the real and the fictitious never existed. Memory is a elusive dancer.

3. Unlike many of my contemporaries on the American Left (including those in the Black Radical Tradition), I found myself first amongst militant nihilists rather than revolutionary idealists. As someone with a distinctive African-American or Black subjectivity (depending on who you ask), there was something perverse about the easy answers offered by the sanctimonious campus Left. The Left was terrified by the fires lit by Black youth in the highways and poor suburbs that seemed to signal a break with history. That’s where I find the smoke. Meanwhile, the nihilists fought the fascists to a standstill in the streets. The nihilists were more honest about the conditions, and continued to be brave out of spite for power.

4. My dad told me he feels that we’re in the worst it’s ever been and I replied “When you were 26, you were living in Philadelphia, and they dropped a bomb on MOVE.” The oft repeated refrain “ICE has guns, we have whistles” is just another variation on the same theme. Violence and non-violence have always played out in this country with the same symphonic resonances. Stokely decided he was sick of getting arrested, as he yelled out for Black Power and for the courthouses in Mississippi to be burned. Eventually, the whistle blowers may join Stokely in history. Or perhaps they won’t? I am not one to say. Political prescription is useless which is why so much of the plans laid by online political strategists fall flat. It reminds me of D. Scott Miller’s statement that...

   1. “There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.”

5. It doesn’t make sense to write about afro-surrealism as a coherent ideology or shared set of practices. Instead, I’ll write about afro-surrealist acts. An act gestures towards the afro-surreal in my view, even if the work itself does not take on afro-surrealist as a label. Perhaps labels especially for self described Black art or writing can often be inhibiting. Through my navigation of afro-surrealist acts, I hope to present a gesture towards surrealism rooted in an African-American cultural experience.

6. Music has always been a core part of how I’ve interpreted the world and how the surreal touched me. The first time I found the surreal was somewhere in a cypher, even before any kind of political awakening. I wrote raps to the Survival Tactics beat. I studied Capital Steez as a sage and mourned his passing. As the years continued, I found myself a member of the strange lofi/abstract rap scene. I watched MIKE play in backyards in Chicago. Talked socialism out with JPEGmafia in Wisconsin. My brothers and I free-styled in front of crowds as we raised money for whatever progressive cause it was at that time. The avant-garde rappers were the ones I found myself around and listening. This probably had to do with their ethical and artistic and political commitments. The Black avant-garde seems to be have co-opted as it always does. Sorry, referencing Gaza isn’t enough for me to care about those boring bars over Alchemist beats. Communist rappers with zero connection to any kind of movement prance about in front of white crowds. It’s just another marketing ploy. Millionaires who rap like they maroons. The Black Panthers used to press these soul singers. Despite that, Black music remains the through line. It’s filtered through the digital space. Lyrics and beats that touch our dreams. I think the music coming out of Michigan is some of the most surreal. Rappers like BFB DaPackman, Babyfxce E, BabyTron, or Teejayx6. They don’t put on radical airs. But they describe the strangeness of life. I was listening to more perfect by Crashprez in 2015, not anything Kendrick was dropping, though no disrespect, his work always made more sense. HIT DA DJANGO. He said “Netflix the death of our friends” and he couldn’t have been more prescient. I wish the rappers had listened. But the TikToks are supposed to free us, I guess.

7. At nineteen, I watched smoke rise from a burning limo. From that moment on, any political solution seemed ludicrous because the world itself was far too strange. As I waited in the jail and then went home, I couldn’t understand how everyone could go back to regular life after witnessing fires in the streets. My political journey began on the streets of D.C. where I was baptized like so many others in tear gas and pepper spray. The youth in Nairobi, Ferguson, Chicago, Lagos, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Garoua, Atlanta, New York City, Maputo,Antananarivo, Oakland, Douala, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum and countless other cities will not stop running towards the gun fire and smoke.

8. My friend told me a similar story about witnessing the students during the Estallido Social in Chile. I remarked that political resistance is so rare to see in the United States, so it makes sense, that sometimes to see your reality clear, you have to leave it. In late July this year, I walked through the Bogside and stared at murals of the Republican martyrs.

9. It’s Hell on Earth, and the city’s on fire
   Inhale, in Hell, there’s Heaven

   There’s a bull and a matador dueling in the sky

   Inhale, in Hell, there’s Heaven

   from Frank Ocean’s Solo off his album Blonde

10. 3-D Printed Fully-Automatic Glocks. Burning liquor stores at a riot. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Communists who keep seeming to disappear. Leaving your wallet in El Segundo. The strange feeling you get when you are sitting alone in a Crown Fried Chicken waiting for your food. Underground kick boxing tournaments hosted in neglected warehouses on the edge of the urban metropolis. Scraps of surrealist acts.

11. I’ve been personally bored of afro-futurism and speculative literature in African-American literature for a while. I won’t name titles, but for whatever reason, all of the popular African-American and other writers from the African diaspora are obsessed with the future. I don’t think it’s useless as a frame, but it struggles. It struggles at least for me because D. Scott Miller explains, the horrors have already happened. The four horsemen rode in too long ago to recall. The future has been around so long, it’s the past. This unites with my critique of afro futurism. I think afro-futurism often dovetails with a set of politics in terms of how it predicts a better world. I do not personally think that believing in an better world is a useful project, intellectually or artistically. Don’t mistake me for an Afro-pessimist, though! A prospective project of afro-surrealism is distinctive from afro-futurism. The original European surrealists understood their work to be the unity between dreams and reality. The surreal. In many ways, the afro-surrealist project remains the same in my view. It is a melding of the reality with the unreal. I think this is where at least in my view afro-futurism struggles as art. It is too fixated upon futurity and other worlds that it cannot grapple with the real and when the dreams enter the real.

12. People love Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books. I am one of those people. But I worry that readers take the wrong things from those books. They see those books as prescriptive politically. Butler teaches that we should all create go-bags and form communes in the woods and try to survive the ongoing crises. Rather than understanding that the ongoing crises will transform us and our subjectivities, the cult of Earthseed seeks to preserve the world. To simply survive it. For all of the arguments about Butler as prophetic, her books to me speak to a disappointing future, where people continue to trod along in their menial lives and a belief in “the stars” as some grand destiny. There is nothing surreal about Butler’s vision. There is nothing in the Parables that brings the dreams into reality. Lauren’s dream is a sad one restricted by her world. Most of the Black dystopian writers suffer the same fate. They are too crushed by reality to let their dreams enter reality.

13. Can’t press rewind, life is like the movies, baby
    Pray you don’t use me, baby, pray they don’t shoot me, baby
    Only way you’ll lose me, I been feeling loopy lately
    I keep it on me, I don’t use the safety, nah (Nah)

    from Vince Staples’ Rose Street off his album Ramona Park Broke My Heart

14. Freedom dreams as a concept are troubling. They are some of the most important ideas that govern Black intellectual life whether it’s among the writers, the video artists or the communist writers. But dreams are just dreams even if you adorn them with freedom. They aren’t necessarily free. Freedom dreams to me are just another afro-futurist or speculative project with little grounding in reality. They fixate something better in the future somewhere rather a thing that may enter into our present reality. My own pleasant experiences with Robin Kelley aside, the freedom dreams that were offered by so many of those Black leftist intellectuals I looked up to failed to account for reality. What is a freedom dream to the Black proletariat hiding in the restroom, so he doesn’t have to go back to work in the Amazon factory? The Black radical and socialist journals do not have an answer. i don’t either. But I’d ask questions. There’s nothing freeing about a dream itself. Dreams must touch reality. I’m sick of all of the art about a better world or nostalgia for the CPUSA, the Panthers, or any other past artistic/political movements. What do they tell us of the smoke? Of the fires? Of the forgotten youth in Baton Rouge? Very little I’m afraid.

15. In terms of fixation on the past, I trouble with historical stories most of the time as they often treat the past as some far away thing. Music, literature, art, politics, culture...it was all better back then. Or maybe it was all worse and look how far we came. The problem is that much of the art that centers itself around history fails to understand how history lives with us now. Baldwin was amazing because he wrote for his time. We must write for our time now. Surreality engages with the slippages between time. I’ve been nostalgic though, who hasn’t?

16. In the original plan for this essay, I wanted to chart some sort of grand historical narrative about surrealism in the African-American tradition in the original version of this essay. But that was too much work, and didn’t make sense at all once I started thinking about it. I think D. Scott is correct that Invisible Man is perhaps the most important book that remains foundational to how we all think about a surrealism rooted in African-American culture. My other four offerings would be Black No More by George Schuyler, Ark of Bones by Henry Dumas, Oreo by Fran Ross and Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. I can’t express enough that Reed might deserve just as much as credit as Ellison for breathing air into this shit. There’s a reason he live in Oakland. For something a bit more contemporary, Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Black Arms to Hold You Up exists out of time. Probably the best thing to make sense of the past forty years.

17. Leimert Park, Oakland, Memphis, New Orleans, Jackson, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, the last few Black parts of New York City, Houston, Baltimore, the last few Black parts of D.C., Atlanta (especially at night), and a couple other cities I haven’t visited, but I’m sure qualify. Space is the place even if the place is not in space. And probably shouldn’t be in space, considering my prior critiques of Octavia Butler.

18. But the reality was that the present was the only thing that ever made sense even when it didn’t. I found glimpses of the surreal in my reading as life continued. The television show Atlanta remains one of the few examples of the Afro-surreal that seemed equivalent to the political acts of my youth. It was because Atlanta is the present. Glover’s later music where he stopped being a incel obsessed with Asian women touched the afro-surreal occasionally. Not every moment, but he touched the strangeness of the current moment. Vince Staples and his television show manage to do similar things as Donald Glover’s show. In some ways, I think he executes it more clearly than Glover does, but since he was second, Staples has gotten less praise. I may need to write something separate, but I don’t really enjoy watching television. Both shows are located in the present. So much of what composes African-American is talking and thinking about the past. I suppose the problem was that the past is happening at the same time that present is. And then that brings us to the afro-futurists. I used to be among them. But the future doesn’t exist. We can dream about Black people in space, societies based on mutual aid, some elusive “community” where we all love each other, or whatever socialist fantasy people want to engage in, but those things were always far less interesting to me than the metaphorical fires in the street and in the skies. In terms of art, the Afro-surrealist was thing that I’ve found that makes precisely because it doesn’t make sense.

19. I wrote a manifesto about Afro-surrealism. I dunno if I agree with most of it now, but I agree with the general confused thrust towards something that’s intangible and yet present like our dreams.

20. Assymetric unconventional extremists – Roaches don’t fly,

    You don’t have to be here if you don’t wanna

    from Armand Hammer’s Roaches Don’t Fly off their album Haram